Father's Day
by StarWarrior72
Summary: Fluff. This is my first attempt at a Luke and Ben fic, so please don't be too annoyed if they're out of character, I did my best. The image is temporary, I plan to fix it up.


I was sitting at my desk, working, when Ben disturbed me for the first time.

"Daddy? What's catch?"

"Catch is a game." I told him, turning to face him.

"Is it somethin' dads do with their kids?" he asked curiously.

"I guess so." I scooped him up and put him on the desk.

"What do you do?"

"Um... You take a ball, and you throw it back and forth. It's really quite dull."

"Oh. Did you ever play it with your daddy?"

That was a strange question. "Ben, you know I never played with my father."

"Right. Was he a good daddy?"

"No, not really. Not for most of the time I knew him, anyway."

Ben started to shift through the datapads I had been searching through. "Was he as busy as you?"

"I don't really know, but I assume he would have been." I took one of them back; it had some content I wouldn't want him to delete by accident.

"Oh. Is that why he didn't play with you?"

"I don't know, Ben. I can't read minds quite that well."

Ben picked up another datapad, apparently determined to play with one of them. I passed him one of his teddies instead.

"But he wanted you to turn to the Dark Side to be with him?" Ben asked, taking the teddy and hugging it. Then he started to 'read' to it, reciting one of his favourite stories while gazing at the latest datapad.

"Ben, can we talk about this later? I'm a little bit overloaded right now. Why don't you go play with Mommy?" I picked him up and put him on the ground.

"Mommy's with Auntie Leia. She's not gonna be back for a while." Ben looked at me with huge eyes.

"Why don't you go play with Jaina?" I suggested, praying he would take that bait.

He brightened, "Is Jacen with her?"

"There's only one way to find out, why don't you go check?" I shooed him towards the door.

A few minutes later, he was back, "Daddy, Jacen's not there."

"Then play with Jaina. Ben, I'm sorry, but I'm very busy right now."

"Jaina's not there. I wanna play with you."

"Ben, I'm really sorry. I just have to finish here. Then we can play, I promise." I picked him up and carried him up to his room. Then I took out some of his favourite toys and passed them to him.

"I wanna play with you." He insisted.

I sighed, "Ben, trust me. I'd rather be playing with you, but that would be bad. I'll play with you when I'm all done, okay?"

Ben picked up one of his stuffed animals and looked into the blank eyes, "You're always busy."

"I know, Kiddo. Daddy's trying to not be busy. Just play with your toys for a while, and maybe we can play later." I kissed his forehead and returned to my desk.

Looking at the mountain of datapads, I put my head on the desk. It was almost hopeless; there were reports to complete, training to do, and now a toddler to take care of. Ben was a sweet little kid, I knew, but he could be terribly underfoot without even being aware of it.

I dragged myself back up and returned to sorting reports. Now the piles were slightly different, as I was trying to rush a bit more. The original categories, plus a Not-Immediately-Obvious pile. I figured that would speed the process up a bit so I could return to playing with my son.

"Daddy, fix it." Ben begged, holding up a broken toy. The control panel was hanging off its back.

"Ben, how did you even do this?" I asked, looking at the toy.

"I wanted to fix stuff like you do." Ben said, holding up some tools he must have taken from up in my room.

"So you pulled your bear apart?"

"Yeah, an' now I can't get it back together." Ben sniffled, and a tear trickled down his cheek.

I reassembled the bear as quickly as possible, and sent Ben back upstairs to play some more.

I returned to the pile in front of me. Wondering absently what Ben would try next, I started to work on a report from the Vjun system, a place I had to admit I was curious about. After all, my father had lived there.

"Daddy, play with me." Ben demanded, coming up behind me again.

"I'm sorry. I just can't play right now." I told him.

"Why not?" He asked.

"Because I'm very busy, all right?"

"No. You're always busy. You never play with me. You always gotta be doing somethin' about the stupid Jedi."

"The Jedi aren't stupid. Mommy and Daddy are both Jedi, and I'd like it if you could be a little more polite. After all, someday you'll be a Jedi too."

Ben folded his little arms and sat down on the floor with a thud. "What if I don't want to? What'd you do then? What if I'd rather be a Sith?"

"Ben. Don't talk like that. You know the Sith are evil."

"But what if I wanna be a Sith anyhow? Would you an' Mommy send me away?"

"No, of course not. You would still be our little son. We'd love you no matter what."

"I bet I'd get more attention if I was a Sith." Ben said loudly.

"What makes you say that?" I asked, perplexed.

"You're always paying attention to Sith. An' I never get any attention at all. I bet you don't even know what today is."

I didn't. His birthday wasn't for a couple more months, and life day had just passed. "I give up. What's today?" I asked, hoping he would think I was playing.

"It's Father's Day. That's when daddies are supposed to play with their kids. But my daddy didn't even know."

I nearly swore out loud. I was frustrated with myself for not noticing. That must have been what all those people had meant when they said that they could take a bit of the work "because you need time off".

"Ben, I'm really sorry. But I have a bunch of work to do today, okay? How would you like to have Father's Day tomorrow?"

"But it's not tomorrow. It's today. An' you're always busy. You'll be busy tomorrow too. An' then you'll say the next day, an' then you'll be busy then too."

I flinched inwardly. He was probably right.

"All week in class we've been makin' stuff for our daddies, an all the other kids were havin' trouble hidin' the stuff from their daddies. I worked on mine at the dinner table an' you didn't even notice." He was crying.

I picked him up, hoping I could make it better with a hug. "But I wasn't supposed to notice, was I? It's supposed to be a secret, right?"

"I didn't want it to be secret. It didn't even work right, but you could've made it work. If you'd noticed it would've been great."

I looked down into his eyes, feeling terribly guilty.

"An' you're always saying we shouldn't keep secrets."

"Not all secrets are bad secrets," I said, trying desperately to maintain some kind of grasp on the situation.

"Even when I almost scream it at you, you don't hear me." Ben sniffled.

"What do you mean, Benni?"

"I want to play with you. I just wanna play with my daddy on Father's Day."

I stood up. I'd been terribly blind, he was right. From the very beginning, with his questions about my father, he had really been telling me that in some ways he was a better father than I was. I put him down and started to lead him to one of the gyms in the temple. He slipped his little hand into mine, and squeezed carefully at a place he had accidently discovered made the prosthetic twitch a little.

I laughed, "Ben, don't do that."

He gave my hand another little pinch and it twitched again. "You tickle me. This isn't that different."

I nodded. That was true enough. He gave my hand another pinch and I scooped him up and placed him on my shoulders instead. He went limp and hung over my head, arms hanging down on either side of my field of vision. I interrupted his giggles by flipping him over my head, which made him shriek.

"Daddy! That's no fair!"

"It's totally fair," I told him, mock indignant, "At least if playing with my prosthetic is."

He giggled and squirmed for a moment. I put him back on my shoulders, and he put his hands over my eyes, clearly forgetting that I don't really need my eyes in order to see. Just to make him happy, I walked into a wall. He laughed hysterically.

I had expected him to take his hands off after that, but he didn't, and I was forced to blunder into a table, another wall, an open door, and, finally, Jacen, who grinned at us, bemused.

After that, Ben finally removed his hands, still laughing. I waved at Jacen, who rolled his eyes playfully.

Then Ben insisted on playing with my hair. I let him, hoping against hope he wasn't doing anything I couldn't get out.

Finally, we reached the gym. I put him down, and he immediately skipped over to a box of balls. Clearly his talk about catch hadn't been just a request to play with him; it had been a request to play _catch_.

I humoured that for a few minutes before growing too bored to contemplate. The only way out that I could think of was to suddenly become a hopelessly terrible player. I then proceeded to lose the ball several times, Ben dutifully chasing after it, and finally land it in a pool.

Ben looked out at it despondently, "I can't get that."

"Why don't we play something else, then?" I asked hopefully.

"Kay. I wanna play on the balance beams!" Ben proclaimed happily, skipping off towards them.

I followed, and we played on the beams for a while. Finally, after one near-disastrous slip, I took him back up to our quarters.

"That was fun, Daddy." Ben said happily.

"Yes, it was." I told him, getting him a glass of juice and giving it to him. After a moment, I decided to try it too. The toxic green colour had put me off so far, but Ben clearly loved it.

"I wanna do that again."

"Me too." I tried the stuff. It was… interesting.

"Can we do that again tomorrow?"

"Maybe. I'll have to see how busy I am."

He pouted, "You're always busy."

"I'll try to change that, I swear."

"Mommy says not to swear." Ben reprimanded, hoping onto a chair at the table.

"Mommy means a different kind of swear, believe me."

"What kind of swear does Mommy mean?"

"The kind she would kill me for explaining to you."

"You mean like the words Mommy uses sometimes when she's mad?"

Mara never swears when there's even the slightest chance Ben might hear, instead, she uses ordinary words out of context.

"Sort of. Those are Mommy's non-swears. But Mommy will be mad if you use those too."

"Okay. No swears, no non-swears. Got it." Ben returned his full attention to his juice. I was still trying to come to any kind of decision as to the flavour. I honestly couldn't even tell if I liked it.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, Ben?"

"Why is Mommy laughing?" Ben pointed over my shoulder at Mara, who was doubled up in laughter, having just entered with Leia.

"I have no idea. Mara, why are you laughing?"

"Did you let Ben play with your hair?" Mara asked, and Leia slipped away from the door.

"Yes, why?"

"That son of ours is not to be trusted with hair."

I reached up, worrying about what Ben might have done. The back of my head was sticky.

"Ben, what did you do?"

"I think spiky hair looks cool." Ben stated matter-of-factly.

"Sit down, Farmboy, let me get this out for you." Mara pushed me down onto a sofa and got a wet rag.

Ben sat down opposite us, looking vaguely disappointed that we were taking the hairstyle back out.

"What did you use to do this, Ben?" Mara asked him.

"I dunno. It was on his belt." Ben shrugged innocently.

I reached down to my belt. Only one thing was missing. "It's glue."

Mara sighed. "Get comfortable. This could take a very long time."


End file.
